Does anyone have that one (or several) kanji that every time you see it, you can’t help but laugh or smile? Maybe the mnemonic you learned is really ridiculous and you giggle each time.
I really like finding kanji like this cause it tends to stick in my mind a lot more.
For example, my two current favourites are…
名 and 町
When I was trying to learn 名 I couldn’t get EVENING MOUTH out of my head because the phrase was repeated so damn much during the mnemonic for both the meaning and the reading. So for a while every time it showed up in reviews, my brain would scream EVENING MOUTH at me and nothing else. While I’m like “But what does it MEAN???”
It got so bad that I told my fiancé about it and now every time he sees it, he yells “ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY EVENING MOUTH!!” and I start dying of laughter.
I was watching the anime Your Name on Netflix recently and when the title card showed up, naturally there was 名 and we both said “ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY EVENING MOUTH!!”
But…I never forget the meaning anymore so that’s something!
町 kills me purely because of the mnemonic.
When I start learning new kanji, I like to look at the reading then try to see if I can come up with my own mnemonic first, then read Wanikani’s mnemonic and I go with the one that sticks in my head better.
So for 町, I was like “Okay…In order for me to get to the football まち, I have to go through the TOWN centre.”
Then I read Wanikani’s mnemonic and choked on my saliva, nearly killing myself.
“You walk into this town. You hate it (because it’s vocab, and who doesn’t hate vocab?). So what do you do? You pull out a match (まち) and burn this town to the ground. Whoa, you some kind of psycho?”
Me: Yeah, drive through the town to get to the football match…
Wanikani: BURN THE TOWN TO THE GROUND!!!
)
